Bankers, peasants, and land in British West Africa 1905–37

Abstract

It has been consistently argued by development practitioners that the absence of rural credit from banks is one of the most debilitating aspects of African rural life. It has also been argued by historians that European bankers in Africa deliberately discriminated against rural African credit seekers. In this article we argue that, over a period of three decades, British bankers attempted to create lending facilities which were to be directly aimed at extending credit to West African smallholders. Bankers were prevented from doing so by the establishment in colonial law of ‘customary’ forms of land tenure overtly hostile to the recognition of African private property in land. The fear on the part of colonial officialdom was that bank credit, extended on the basis of a legal recognition of private property, would have a corrosive effect upon the African ‘community’. In the place of bank credit, officials promoted co‐operatives which were seen as more in keeping with African society. By failing to understand that it was officialdom, rather than bankers, that was responsible for the failure of the creation of rural bank credit, historians have been complicit in the maintainance of a ‘Fabian’ bias in much thinking about land and credit in Africa.